Contents

Installing gramps for X11 using MacPorts

Right now, I will just get the basic information down as to the troubles I ran into and how I fixed them. I will later put in more detailed instructions on using MacPorts and the rest.

Starting

So, assuming you have MacPorts installed and updated, you might as well try:
sudo port install gramps
Now, if you're like me and didn't have GNOME or anything like that installed, calling that command will attempt to go through all of the dependencies and install them all. This will take a while, and you might be at this installing gramps for a couple hours (there are a lot of dependencies)

What I did instead was run
port deps gramps, which listed the major dependencies that gramps has. Then, I installed each separately. They are:
shared-mime-info
py-gnome
py-bsddb
I installed them in the following order:

shared-mime-info

py-bsddb

py-gnome (the tough one)

shared-mime-info

In order to successfully install this, I first had to run:
sudo port install p5-xml-sax
sudo port install p5-xml-sax-expat
After that, things installed smoothly

py-bsddb

This actually installed smoothly on my computer.

py-gnome

For now, I merely list the libraries and what I did to fix the problem.

py-gtk2

I had to make sure to upgrade expat. After that, it installed fine.

I had a real difficulty getting this to fully install. It kept choking on Cairo. After updating XTools to 2.5, Cairo installed without a problem. --A.southern.yankee 23:46, 1 May 2008 (EDT)

py-orbit

This installed without any problems for me.

libzvt

This package needs "dbus" which in turn needs "xmlto". It appears, however, that "xmlto" is not listed as a dependent of "dbus". Hence, I ran sudo port install xmlto by hand. This installed without any problems on my computer.

After installing that, and upgrading gtk2 (do this first), this seems to be installing correctly.

gnome-desktop

This was the next problem for me. I installed p5-libxml-perl, p5-xml-simple, py-xml by hand, cleaned gnome-desktop, and then tried the installation again. Worked fine!

gstreamer

This was the next problem for me. I installed p5-xml-libxslt, py-libxslt by hand, cleaned gstreamer, and then tried the installation again. Worked fine!

liboil

First, I ran sudo port upgrade gtk-doc

Then, I installed the newest version of the liboil library from [1] and then tried to make the liboil library again. (From the manual download). This worked. I would assume it would work for the port version as well.

nautilus

This was the last problem for me. To get around the error, I had to create a soft link for the libintl.3.dylib file in my /opt/local/lib/ directory.

Conclusion

Those errors were the ones I ran into. I was able to get gramps to work after that, with some of the same glitches as described below.

Glitches

There are some problems.

Help does not work (clicking Help or FAQ etc on the Help menu does nothing).

'Enter' or 'return' does not act as OK for closing windows (the button has to be pressed with the mouse). However Esc does work to exit from the window.

The browser and email links under the help menu do nothing.

It is not possible to start Gramps by double clicking on a Mac OS icon, nor by double clicking on a Gramps database that is associated with the application. (It should be possible to create an installation that allows this, just as it is available for OpenOffice).

The PdfDoc.py plugin cannot be installed because ReportLab is not installed.

Note, using macports, run sudo port install py-reportlab . This will take care of this problem.

For fink, run fink install reportlab-py25 (py24 or py23, for earlier versions of python).

The LPRDoc.py plugin cannot be loaded because the python bindings for GNOME print are not installed.

Spell checking does not work (on starting Gramps, an error warning "Spelling checker is not installed" appears on the xterm). The python "bindings for [GNOME print and spell checking] are probably in fink's gnome-python2-desktop-py24 and gnome-python2-extras-py24 packages. Or would be, if fink had them at all, which we don't. They are only viable for for newer versions of gnome itself than fink presently has, or have other dependencies that are not yet satisfiable within fink. We're working on it".